Archives: Dr. Sophia Mun

Abraham Maslow introduced the Hierarchy of Needs in 1943 and put “self-actualization” at its very peak. According to him, self-actualization represents the highest order of motivations (need), which drive us to realize our true potential and achieve our “ideal self”. The continuous growth in the self-help book market might be supporting the existence of this need in human beings; however, achieving the “best (ideal) self” is not as easy as it sounds.  

Why?  

Life is suffering. Life is full of challenges and pains. If achieving the best self were our life goal, then challenges and obstacles are along the way to reach to the goal. We could fulfill our potential only by overcoming challenges, but it is difficult to face sufferings.   

Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. 

Once we truly know that life is difficult- once we truly understand and accept it-then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters. 

The Road Less Traveled- M. Scott Peck

I had my first son 12 years ago. It was a such a demanding job to take care of a new-born baby. I could not sleep the whole night for months in order to feed the baby. The pain from sleep deprivation took away all the joyful moments I should have had with my baby. I was angry and even depressed. Four years later, I had my second son. He woke up every two hours during night like his brother. But from the experience, I already knew what it would be like to take care of a new-born baby, and I already had accepted the fact that this was a demanding job. Once I accepted the fact, I found myself enjoying the time spent with my son day and night.  

If you want to be your best self, first of all, accept the fact that life is suffering. Then, you could use all of your resources and energy not to complain about the problem, but to solve it. Then, you could get one step closer to your best self.    

If you want to make your life better, you gotta do what’s right every single day. 

Blue Miracle

Once we accept the necessity of challenges and pain in our lives and do our best to make things better, we could grow. To ameliorate pains and grow, what we need most is to take responsibility and act courageously and truthfully.

We must each adopt as much responsibility as possible for individual life, society, and the world. 

12 Rules for Life an Antidote to Chaos Jordan Peterson

You have a choice to take an easier way. That is doing nothing. But the problem is when you choose the easier one, the pain doubles to say the least. You need to be courageous to choose the difficult path. In other words, you need to have the courage to take responsibility and commit to the truth. Are you willing have courage for your best self?  

References

Peck, M. S. (1978). The road less traveled : a new psychology of love, traditional values, and spiritual growth. Simon and Schuster. 

Peterson, J. B., Doidge, N., & Van, S. E. (2018). 12 rules for life: An antidote to chaos. 

Quintana, J. (2021). Blue Miracle. IMDbPro. 

The “60-day Lifestyle Project” is an assignment given in one of my classes that requires students to pick one good habit that they want to create (e.g., exercising more, drinking more water, reading the Bible regularly) and to keep doing that same activity every day for 60 days. As a professor, it has brought me great joy to see many of my students building good habits successfully. In just a few years of experience with this project, I found that one of the most popular activities students chose was to reduce their screen time. Since we are living in the digital age, it is impossible to imagine our lives without digital products. But my experiment has been providing evidence that many people are realizing that they are spending more time on screens than necessary.   

Why We Do What We Do  

Why are we spending excessive time on digital screens? Basically, we do what we do because we wish to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Therefore, we use digital products as a way to make ourselves feel better. Moreover, such products are useful in many ways, and they can increase our productivity to a certain point. But once you pass that threshold, your productivity actually decreases ¹. Even though you might recognize the harmful effects of digital products on your productivity and well-being (such as distracting our attention from very important things, including studying, taking care of our kids, and working), it is hard to reduce or stop this behavior. Uncontrolled and heavy consumption of technology disrupts the pleasure control system, leading to the bad habit becoming an addiction. You might be uncomfortable naming this behavior along with other severe forms of addiction, such as substance abuse; however, the two have much in common in terms of their definition and in how they work.   

Defining Addiction  

The root word addict comes from the Latin word addictus, which means “to devote, sacrifice, sell out, betray, or abandon.” In Roman law, an addict was a person that became enslaved through a court ruling—a secondary derivation from its legal usage that persisted as descriptive and no longer literal². The modern definition of addiction is a “persistent compulsive use of a substance known by the user to be harmful.” While the modern and Latin definitions are quite different, a connection can certainly be drawn between the two. Research has shown that addiction is a disease that chemically alters your brain, making you “a slave” to a behavior or substance². 

Brain Disease Model of Addiction  

In the past two decades, research has increasingly supported the view that addiction is a disease of the brain³. The brain disease model of addiction holds that addictions are chronic, relapsing brain diseases and that the relapses are symptoms—and part of the expected course—of the disease. As with other diseases, addictions can be caused by multiple factors, which can be behavioral, environmental, and biological. The brain disease model of addiction suggests that addiction can be explained by findings on the desensitization of reward circuits, which dampen the ability to feel pleasure and the motivation to pursue everyday activities; increasing strength of conditioned responses and stress reactivity, which results in increased cravings for alcohol and other drugs, as well as negative emotions when these cravings are not sated; and weakening of the brain regions involved in executive functions such as decision making, inhibitory control, and self-regulation, leading to repeated relapses³. 

Digital Addiction  

Behavioral addiction is a lot like substance addiction in many ways; however, it is much newer. Although such behavioral addictions do not involve a chemical intoxicant or substance, a group of researchers has posed that some core indicators of behavioral addiction are similar to those of chemical or substance addiction⁴. First of all, it is similar to substance addiction in that the addiction develops when we have a psychological need. We use substances when we are bored or feeling lonely (these are the moments when you are looking for what some people call the “adult pacifier”). Second, excessive use of digital products bears striking similarities to those diagnosed with substance abuse in terms of dopamine stimulation. While we are trying to remain connected by means of texting, tweeting, surfing the web, online shopping, and gambling, these actions activate the same neural circuits in our brains involved in the use of substances⁴.  Although not as intense as a hit of cocaine, the extensive use of digital products similarly results in a release of dopamine, reinforcing whatever behavior preceded it. Thus, users find themselves unable to stop, for when they are not using their devices, they are in a state of dopamine deficit ⁵.  

How to Break the Bad Habit?  

Is there any way to break the bad habit? This is a big question to answer here, but research has found some factors that can increase the possibility of success. People with a certain social status, meaningful jobs, spouse, and people who have bright futures are less likely to become addicted and stay addicted to something. In other words, people who have more things to lose are more likely to be resilient to addiction. Fortunately, this could apply not only to their physical condition but also to their psychological mindset and what they believe. To illustrate, if we believe that we have a lot of potential things to lose (e.g., if you know who you really are in Jesus Christ), then we will be less likely to become addicted and will have more of a chance to break the bad habits ⁶.   

Digital products aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, so it is up to us as users to decide how much of our time we want to dedicate to them. If you believe you are experiencing harmful effects from overusing digital products, why don’t you try some of the tricks that have been successful for my students. For example, some of them have set up a time limit use on their phones, placed their phone in a locked drawer, designated screen-free zones, and so on. More importantly, we need to remind ourselves of what we are losing while we are on screen.  

References 

1. https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-economy-and-the-internet-what-lies-ahead 

2. Richard J. Rosenthal & Suzanne B. Faris (2019) The etymology and early history of ‘addiction’, Addiction Research & Theory, 27:5, 437-449, DOI: 10.1080/16066359.2018.1543412 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epub/10.1080/16066359.2018.1543412?needAccess=true 

3. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmra1511480  

4. Alavi, S. S., Ferdosi, M., Jannatifard, F., Eslami, M., Alaghemandan, H., & Setare, M. (2012). Behavioral Addiction versus Substance Addiction: Correspondence of Psychiatric and Psychological Views. International journal of preventive medicine, 3(4), 290–294. 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3354400/pdf/IJPVM-3-290.pdf

5. Constant craving: how digital media turned us all in to dopamine addicts https://www.theguardian.com/global/2021/aug/22/how-digital-media-turned-us-all-into-dopamine-addicts-and-what-we-can-do-to-break-the-cycle 

6. Myles, D. (2020). The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business DAVID T. COURTWRIGHT Cambridge, USA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019 ISBN: 9780674737372, 336 pp. Hardcover. Price: US$27.95. Drug & Alcohol Review, 39(4), 428–429. 

https://doi-org.libproxy.calbaptist.edu/10.1111/dar.13047

Sophia Mun  

Nobody wants to fail. Failure is avoided at all costs. But, according to Jerry Useem, an editor at the Atlantic, there are three things to know about failure: 1) It happens. 2) It can be destructive in ways you have never imagined. 3) Believe it or not, there’s a right way to do it.  

Do you agree with “Failure is an option”? Then, stay tuned to this blog sharing two big ideas about the right way to do it:  1) Separate the failure from the person 2) View failure as a learning opportunity.  

Separate the Failure from the Person     

Retracting the steps to understand what went wrong helps you to be less emotional and go straight to failure itself. The first step to deal with failure is to accept it. If we don’t admit it, there is nothing to talk about. So, you have to admit something has been proven wrong. Then, analyze the failure with the following questions: “What happened?”, “Why did it happen?”, “Is it because of you?”, “Or is it because of the situation?”  

Attribution theory is concerned with how people explain the causes of behavior and events (Fiske & Taylor, 1991). The attribution literature commonly distinguishes between dispositional and situational influences (Harvey et al., 2014). The key to deal with failure is differentiating dispositional (internal such as personality traits) and situational (external) attributions of failure. If you make a dispositional attribution, you might think for example, “This went wrong because I did not do my best”.  If you make a situational attribution, you will find causes from the situation.  Because individuals are biased by the Fundamental Attribution Error, which causes one to overestimate the role of disposition (Ross, 1997), it would be much easier to differentiate self from failure if you make a situational attribution. But, even when you believe you failed because of what you did, failure can be told as something that happens to you and not something that you are.  

Separate the failure from the person. Failure is something you did or that happened to you, not something that defines you.  

Washing Disciples’ Feet 

This reminds me of the story of John 13 about Washing Disciples’ feet  

¹ It was just before the Passover Festival. Jesus knew that the hour had come for him to leave this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. ² The evening meal was in progress, and the devil had already prompted Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot, to betray Jesus. ³ Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power and that he had come from God and was returning to God; ⁴ so he got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around his waist. ⁵ After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples’ feet, drying them with the towel that was wrapped around him. ⁶ He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?” 

⁷ Jesus replied, “You do not realize now what I am doing, but later you will understand.” ⁸ “No,” said Peter, “you shall never wash my feet.” Jesus answered, “Unless I wash you, you have no part with me.” ⁹ “Then, Lord,” Simon Peter replied, “not just my feet but my hands and my head as well!” ¹⁰ Jesus answered, “Those who have had a bath need only to wash their feet; their whole body is clean. And you are clean, though not every one of you.” ¹¹ For he knew who was going to betray him, and that was why he said not everyone was clean. 

Dirt on our feet might be a failure that can be washed out. Failure happens but we are still clean. We need only to wash our feet because the whole body is clean.  Separate the Failure from the Person!      

View Failure as a Learning Opportunity 

I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed. 

-Michael Jordan- 

If we could learn from failure, it is not all bad. But the problem is we are often overwhelmed by the emotional aspect of failure. The way to bypass emotional aspects and go straight to the lessons that can be learned is to ask yourself, “What will I do differently tomorrow, to get me to the outcome I wanted?” Having concrete takeaways can help you continue to meet your goals and help others do so as well. Focus on a big goal: professional growth. This motivates people who’ve failed to try again.  

We do not have to encourage failure. But it is an essential part of our lives. If it happens no matter how hard we try to avoid it; it is wise to learn how to respond to it and more importantly make the most out of it. Don’t take failures of what you did as failures of yourself. Take your failure experience as your growth opportunity.  When we follow the right way to fail, we are more likely to get back up, move forward, try again, and advance.    

References 

Jerry Useem https://www.inc.com/magazine/19980501/922.html 

Fiske, S. T., & Taylor, S. E. (1991). Social cognition (2nd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill 

Harvey, P., Madison, K., Martinko, M., Crook, T. R., & Crook, T. A. 

(2014).  https://eds.b.ebscohost.com/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=1&sid=45c1e71d-3b54-4631-9b06-48f56d674ef8%40pdc-v-sessmgr01 

Ross, L. (1977). 

http://web.mit.edu/curhan/www/docs/Articles/15341_Readings/Social_Cognition/Ross_Intuitive_Psychologist_in_Adv_Experiment_Soc_Psych_vol10_p173.pdf 

Sophia Mun & Russ Bermejo

This is my second year at CBU. The thing that I love most working at CBU is that I am able to do faith integration in classrooms. One day in my first year, I got curious if I could measure the effectiveness of the faith integration I was doing in my classrooms. This led Professor Bermejo and I to start a small research project. In this blog, we would like to briefly share the process of this research and what we have found so far.  

Identify the General Study Idea

The integration of faith and learning is a key feature of Christian higher education. Faculty members in Christian institutions are encouraged to foster integration between students’ understanding of subjects and their faith. At CBU, professors integrate the “Core 4” outcomes in their course instruction so students are (1) academically prepared, (2) Biblically rooted, (3) globally minded, and (4) equipped to serve. Our shared vision of being “unapologetically Christian and academic rigorous” is challenging and inspiring. But how can we assess the effectiveness of faith integration in our classrooms?  

Choose the Research Topic  

First of all, we wanted to see whether our faith integration work in classrooms has an impact on the extent to which students work to integrate their faith with their discipline/class. Second, we also wanted to identify the factors contributing to student faith integration. The purpose of this project was to determine whether and how taking a class in a Christian institution predicts changes in students’ faith integration. Research questions of this project were “Is there any changes in the degree to which students engage in faith integration at the beginning and the end of semester?” And “What factors promote changes?”  

Formulate Plan and Methodology 

Professor Bermejo and I created an online survey to measure basic demographic information and student faith integration. Student faith integration was measured at Time 1 (beginning of semester) and Time 2 (end of semester) using the Psychology and Faith Integration (Psy-FI) Scale (Collison et al., 2019). The scale contains 27 items (e.g., “I often think about how psychology and my faith relate to each other.”) with response options ranging from 1 (Disagree strongly) to 6 (Agree Strongly). Changes in student faith integration were calculated by subtracting student faith integration Time 1 from Time 2. Other variables were also included as possible contributing factors: school year, the course they were taking (BEH or PSY), experience of taking psychology classes, instructor (Professor B. or M.), and spirituality (Instructor & Self).   

Collet Data  

The data was collected in 6 classrooms (PSY & BEH courses) in 2020 fall semester. Longitudinal data was collected from a sample of 161 students (students took the same survey twice at the beginning and the end of semester). The survey was distributed and data was collected via Qualtrics.  

Analyze Data & Present Findings   

We conducted a hierarchical multiple regression analysis to explore contributing factors in changes in student faith integration. Three significant predictors were found: student spirituality, experience of taking psychology classes, and students’ prior faith integration (Time 1, beginning of semester).  Regarding experience of taking psychology classes, we found that students who had not taken a psychology class before showed increases in the degree to which student engage in their faith integration. In addition, students with low faith integration at Time 1 reported increases in faith integration at the end of the semester. Overall, our results demonstrate that faith integration in our classrooms was promoted especially for students with lack of exposure to faith integration in lower-level courses and students with low prior faith integration.  

Summary & Discussion 

Our results show effects of faith integration in classrooms vary depending on students’ experiences and existing levels of faith integration. In summary, we found that faith integration in classrooms may not benefit all students in the degree to which student engage in faith integration. It should be attuned to differences among students in their experience and their prior level of faith integration (e.g., applying different approaches of faith integration to lower level and upper-level classes). 

References 

Collison, B., Eck, B. E., Edwards, J. M., & Allen, E. C. (2019). The Psy-FI Scale: A Measure of Psychology and Faith Integration. Journal of Psychology and Christianity, 38(2), 67–80.  

By Dr. Sophia S. Mun

Since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, older adults have been identified as the most vulnerable age group to the virus. Reactions to the virus’s spread in the U.S. vary, ranging grocery stores offering specific shopping hours for elderly customers to provide additional protection to the opposite extreme of nicknaming COVID-19 “the Boomer remover.” There are many reasons people have these different responses. One of these reasons is ageism.

What is Ageism?

Ageism is prejudice or discrimination against a particular age group, especially the elderly. Along with race and gender, age is commonly used to categorize and form stereotypes about others. As with other -isms, ageism involves a very pervasive us versus them thinking, and this fuels otherness and separateness. A unique thing about ageism is that age is the only category in which the members of the in-group (the young) will eventually join the out-group (the old) in the end. There is no exception to it, because everyone is getting old, right? More importantly, negative stereotypes about aging that people have been holding since they were young do not change or disappear but become internalized such that people hold those beliefs to be true about themselves as they age. Therefore, negative stereotypes originally held about other people become negative self-perceptions of aging in later life.

Origins of Ageism

Where do negative stereotypes originate? I often hear biased descriptions of older adults from my 5-year-old son and, it turns out, negative views of and attitudes toward older adults can start early in life. We are barraged from childhood on with the negative message that aging is undesirable (You might have seen birthday cards that poke fun of older adulthood.). In a modern society that values productivity, elders are seen as less valuable because we believe that older adults are less productive and efficient. Greenberg et al. (2002) suggested that age prejudice arises from a fear of our own mortality as well. They found that merely thinking about (or seeing) an older person tends to arouse anxiety about the fact that one has a short time on earth, and the fear associated with such cognitions tends to provoke the perceiver to dislike the individual (or group) who elicits such fear. Ageism is prejudice against our feared future self (Nelson, 2005).

Effects of Negative Perception of Aging on Health

One good reason to bring more attention to this issue is that negative perceptions of aging can take a heavy toll on our health. One of the most recent and largest examinations of the health consequences of ageism found that it harms the health of older people in 45 countries and across 5 continents (the study included over 7 million participants). The research team found evidence that ageism led to worse outcomes for a number of mental health conditions, including depression, and a number of physical health conditions as well as to a shorter life expectancy. It also could lead to a poorer quality of life, compromised social relationships, risky health behaviors, and cognitive impairment (Chang et al., 2020).

Reducing Ageism

Reducing negative perceptions of aging could be a significant factor in predicting better health in later life. It also deactivates otherness and separateness in our society. Negative perceptions of aging and older adults are prevalent in many societies, embedded in societal institutions and expressed in individual perceptions and behaviors. Therefore, unless we challenge this idea, it becomes part of our identities.

So what can we do?

Fortunately, we can still make a difference. There are a lot of approaches we could employ at the institutional level, but let’s focus here on what we can do on a personal level. We can start with an awareness of our attitude, language, and behaviors about aging and older adults. And let’s take the additional step of confronting our fears about aging and loss (physical, status, social, & economic). What is the truth about your fear?

Aging is a natural, powerful, lifelong process that we are all engaged in. We need to learn from scripture about how to treat a part of ourselves and a part of our society. 1 Corinthians 12:20-25 highlights how we all play a role—different roles—in one unified body. There is no age asterisk. This is not about another specific group of people. This is about all of us.

1 Corinthians 12:20-25

²⁰As it is, there are many parts, but one body.²¹The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!”²²On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable,²³and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor. And the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty,²⁴while our presentable parts need no special treatment. But God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it,²⁵so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other.

References

Chang,E.S., Kannoth,S., Levy,S., Wang,S.Y., Lee,J.E., & Levy, B. (2020).Global reach of ageism on older persons’ health: A systematic review. PLOS ONE 15(1). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0220857

Greenberg, J., Schimel, J., & Martens, A. (2002). Ageism: Denying the face of the future. In T. D. Nelson (Ed.), Ageism: Stereotyping and prejudice against older persons (p. 27–48). The MIT Press.

Nelson, T. (2005). Ageism: Prejudice Against Our Feared Future Self. Journal of Social Issues, 61(2). https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4560.2005.00402.x

By Dr. Sophia Mun

If there were a simple way to improve your academic performance, would you try it? If there were an easy way to help you live longer and more healthily, would you be willing to do it? If you said “Yes!” to either of the questions, you might want to read through this article.

Intro

When I studied gerontology a few years ago, there were some research findings that caught my attention. Wait, what? Gerontology? Geology? Geography? Okay—you might have not heard about gerontology. Gerontology is the scientific study of old age, the process of aging, and the particular problems of older adults. Let’s talk more about this in the next blog. Anyway, one fascinating study found that aging self-stereotypes (older individuals’ beliefs about older people) could influence longevity. The study showed that older individuals with more positive self-perceptions of aging lived 7.5 years longer than those with less positive self-perception of aging (Levy et al., 2002). There are more: positive age beliefs protected against dementia (Levy et al., 2018), and negative age beliefs predicted a greater cardiovascular response to stress and worse health behaviors (Levyet al., 2000; Levy & Myers, 2004). Overall, these studies suggest that living with positive thoughts about aging could improve our psychological and physical health. Amazing, right?

What is a mindset?

How can beliefs about ourselves help us be healthier and live longer? This is closely tied to the concept of the mindset. Mindsets are beliefs we hold about ourselves and our most basic qualities, such as personality or talent (Dweck, 2019). It is also a way of thinking about the world. In other words, it is a lens or frame of mind we use to understand ourselves and the world. Scientific research has gathered massive evidence about the power of mindset. Here is a study you would be very interested in. Blackwell et al.(2007) found that the belief that intelligence is malleable (growth mindset) predicted an upward trajectory in grades over two years of junior high school, while a belief that intelligence is fixed (fixed mindset) predicted a flat trajectory. Beliefs about ourselves can increase academic performance, too!

What science says

Science says mindset plays a significant role in determining our well-being and achievements because mindsets are responsible for our behavioral, physiological, and psychological responses (Crumetal.,2017). Mindsets influence what we pay attention to, what we’re motivated to do, how we feel and expect to feel, and what our bodies are prepared to do. And we make decisions every day by our responses.

What the Bible says

The Bible is clear about the power of our minds and beliefs. The Bible says our minds are powerful. Our thoughts and beliefs shape who we are and will become, and our faith decides what we will do in our lives. Mark 9:23 “’If you can?’ said Jesus. ‘Everything is possible for one who believes.’” Matthew 9:22, “Jesus turned, and seeing her he said, ‘Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well.’ And instantly the woman was made well.” Matthew 9:29, “Then he touched their eyes, saying, ‘According to your faith be it done to you.’” In the Bible, belief is a golden key to make things work including miracles.

The power of mind (faith) in an uncertain world

Do you want to prosper in this uncertain world? What you experience today is product of your mindset; what you experience in the future depends on your mindset today. The only thing you have to do is to choose to have a positive mindset. God gave us free will to choose. Science has done great work to explain the power of belief, but there is still a long way to go. It may not give us the whole picture of the power of mindset, but I like leaving some mysteries unsolved—that is what faith is about. What we believe matters.

Changeyour mindset.

Renew your mind (Romans 12:2).

References

Blackwell, L. S., Trzesniewski, K. H., & Dweck, C. S. (2007). Implicit theories of intelligence predict achievement across an adolescent transition: a longitudinal study and an intervention.Child development,78(1), 246–263. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2007.00995.x

Crum, A. J., Leibowitz, K. A., & Verghese, A. (2017). Making mindset matter.Bmj,356, j674.https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.j674Dweck, C. S. (2019). The Choice to Make a Difference. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 14(1), 21–25. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691618804180

Levy, B. R., Slade, M. D., Kunkel, S. R., & Kasl, S. V. (2002). Longevity increased by positive self-perceptions of aging.Journal of personality and social psychology,83(2), 261–270. https://doi.org/10.1037//0022-3514.83.2.261

Levy, B. R., Slade, M. D., Pietrzak, R. H., & Ferrucci, L. (2018). Positive age beliefs protect against dementia even among elders with high-risk gene.PloS one,13(2), e0191004. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0191004

Levy, B. R., Hausdorff, J. M., Hencke, R., & Wei, J. Y. (2000). Reducing cardiovascular stress with positive self-stereotypes of aging.The journals of gerontology. Series B, Psychological sciences and social sciences,55(4), P205–P213. https://doi.org/10.1093/geronb/55.4.p205

Levy, B. R., & Myers, L. M. (2004). Preventive health behaviors influenced by self-perceptions of aging.Preventive medicine,39(3), 625–629. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ypmed.2004.02.029